When will we finally bring an end to child labour?
The International Labour Organisation celebrated its centenary year in 2019. From the beginning, protecting children from labour exploitation has been a core part of ILO’s work.
While progress has been made since 1919, 160 million children are still in child labour. Of these, 70 percent are working in agriculture.
How can this be?
There is no shortage of commitments. In the Sustainable Development Goals, the international community has committed to eliminating child labour by 2025. The UK, Australia, France, and the Netherlands have passed legislation requiring companies to address child labour in their supply chains. Other countries plan to follow suit.
Abhik Sharma, son of a Fairtrade-organic cotton farmer in India.
So how can we turn these commitments into tangible results?
The causes of child labour are multi-faceted. The major factor, however, remains economic. As long as families are not able to earn a decent living from their crops, and youth lack decent employment opportunities, the SDG target will remain difficult to achieve.
Fairtrade works to enable farmers and workers to earn a decent living. Our standards have always strictly prohibited child labour and forced labour. But over time we realized that standards and auditing alone would not solve this deeply rooted problem.
In 2009, we became the first certification scheme to implement a rights-based approach to child labour elimination, ensuring that child protection is a key outcome. We spoke to thousands of children and young people in Fairtrade producer communities about their views and needs. We also collaborated with NGOs, child rights organizations, academic institutions, businesses, and governments to seek solutions that would bring together all actors in the supply chain.
Cocoa farmer Yao Koko helps his daughter Akissi Marie study, Côte d’Ivoire.
Looking back, three key lessons stand out:
Young people and their communities must be at the heart of any solution
In our youth inclusive approach, children and youth identify risks to their wellbeing, map where they feel safe and unsafe, including reasons for these and together with adults from the community, design preventive projects to enhance children’s wellbeing and development.
“Fairtrade’s Youth Inclusive Monitoring and Remediation Program (YICBMR) approach really reveals the many potential causes of child rights violations in the communities and empowers the community to take decisions to address them,” says Franklina Tweneboah Koduah, a Young Leader at a cocoa cooperative in Ghana. “It has made community members more open to share their experience rather than trying to be on the defensive and cover up child labour and other violation cases.”
Producer organizations in more than ten countries have piloted this approach, engaging local community members, schools, and district level governments to address not only child labour, but forced labour and gender-based violence issues.
We must work with governments to ensure children’s long-term safety
If child labour is detected on Fairtrade farms or plantations, our first priority is to act to protect the children and vulnerable individuals affected. Fairtrade producer organizations have reported hundreds of cases of child labour, human trafficking, and gender-based violence.
Severe cases are reported confidentially to governments for follow up. This has led to long-standing human traffickers being arrested and impacted children being able to make a fresh start. But unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Our experience has shown that even if the children are removed from the place of work, they aren’t always safe. They may return to the same work or choose illicit and hidden ways of earning money to survive. Children from single-parent households often take on multiple domestic chores, or care for siblings or grandparents instead. As one 16-year-old boy told us, “I was working and making some money so I could support my schooling. My parents cannot afford to buy me books or shoes. Now I am still working caring for the chicken and goats at home but making no money and cannot go to school.”
Fairtrade is talking to the ILO, governments, and supply chain actors to support youth innovation projects in agriculture for 16 to 18 year olds withdrawn from hazardous labour. Such projects would enable us to understand what alternative income generation projects are most suitable for them.
Everyone in the supply chain needs to collaborate
We can all play a part here. All of us have the power to make change through our purchasing choices. Creating more demand for sustainable and ethically produced products will push companies to do better, as will advocacy and regulations.
Children and young people, no matter where they are, dream of a life free from violence and abuse. This dream is meant to be a basic human right. Let’s not wait another century, or even another decade, to make it a reality.
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